I say luckily for us he did not reach us, and I might also add luckily for himself, for there were only a small beaker of water and some soddened ship’s biscuits with us — so sudden had been the alarm, so unprepared the ship for any disaster. We thought the people on the launch would be better provisioned (though it seems they were not), and we tried to hail them. They could not have heard us, and the next morning when the drizzle cleared — which was not until past mid-day — we could see nothing of them. We could not stand up to look about us because of the pitching of the boat. The sea ran in great rollers, and we had much ado to keep the boat’s head to them. The two other men who had escaped so far with me were a man named Helmar, a passenger like myself, and a seaman whose name I don’t know, a short sturdy man with a stammer.
We drifted famishing, and, after our water had come to an end, tormented by an intolerable thirst, for eight days altogether. After the second day the sea subsided slowly to a glassy calm. It is quite impossible for the ordinary reader to imagine those eight days. He has not — luckily for himself — anything in his memory to imagine with. After the first day we said little to one another, and lay in our places in the boat and stared at the horizon, or watched, with eyes that grew larger and more haggard every day, the misery and weakness gaining upon our companions. The sun became pitiless. The water ended on the fourth day, and we were already thinking strange things and saying them with our eyes; but it was, I think, the sixth before Helmar gave voice to the thing we all had in mind. I remember our voices dry and thin, so that we bent towards one another and spared our words: I stood out against it with all my might, was rather for scuttling the boat and perishing together among the sharks that followed us; but when Helmar said that if his proposal was accepted we should have drink, the sailor came round to him.
I would not draw lots, however, and in the night the sailor whispered to Helmar again and again, and I sat in the bows with my clasp-knife in my hand — though I doubt if I had the stuff in me to fight. And in the morning I agreed to Helmar’s proposal, and we handed halfpence to find the odd man.
The lot fell upon the sailor, but he was the strongest of us and would not abide by it, and attacked Helmar with his hands. They grappled together and almost stood up. I crawled along the boat to them, intending to help Helmar by grasping the sailor’s leg, but the sailor stumbled with the swaying of the boat, and the two fell upon the gunwhale and rolled overboard together. They sank like stones. I remember laughing at that and wondering why I laughed. The laugh caught me suddenly like a thing from without.
I lay across one of the thwarts for I know not how long, thinking that if I had the strength I would drink sea-water and madden myself to die quickly. And even as I lay there I saw, with no more interest than if it had been a picture, a sail come up towards me over the skyline. My mind must have been wandering, and yet I remember all that happened quite distinctly. I remember how my head swayed with the seas, and the horizon with the sail above it danced up and down. But I also remember as distinctly that I had a persuasion that I was dead, and that I thought what a jest it was they should come too late by such a little to catch me in my body.
For an endless period it seemed to me, I lay with my head on the thwart watching the dancing schooner — she was a little ship, schooner-rigged fore and aft — come up out of the sea. She kept tacking to and fro in a widening compass, for she was sailing dead into the wind. It never entered my head to attempt to attract attention, and I do not remember anything distinctly after the sight of her side, until I found myself in a little cabin aft. There is a dim half memory of being lifted up to the gangway and of a big round countenance, covered with freckles and surrounded with red hair, staring at me over the bulwarks. I also had a disconnected impression of a dark face with extraordinary eyes close to mine, but that I thought was a nightmare until I met it again. I fancy I recollect some stuff being poured in between my teeth. And that is all.
CHAPTER 2
THE MAN WHO WAS GOING NOWHERE
The cabin in which I found myself was small and rather untidy. A youngish man with flaxen hair, a bristly straw-coloured moustache, and a dropping nether lip was sitting and holding my wrist. For a minute we stared at one another without speaking. He had watery grey expressionless eyes.
Then just overhead came a sound like an iron bedstead being knocked about and the low angry growling of some large animal. At the same time the man spoke again.
He repeated his question: `How do you feel now?’
I think I said I felt all right. I could not recollect how I had got there. He must have seen the question in my face, for my voice was inaccessible to me.
`You were picked up in a boat — starving. The name on the boat was the Lady Vain, and there were queer marks on the gunwhale.’ At the same time my eye caught my hand, so thin that it looked like a dirty skin purse full of loose bones, and all the business of the boat came back to me.
`Have some of this,’ said he, and gave me a dose of some scarlet stuff, iced.
It tasted like blood, and made me feel stronger.
`You were in luck,’ said he, `to get picked up by a ship with a medical man aboard.’ He spoke with a slobbering articulation, with the ghost of a lisp.
`What ship is this?’ I said slowly, hoarse from my long silence.
`It’s a little trader from Arica and Callao. I never asked where she came from in the beginning. Out of the land of born fools, I guess. I’m a passenger myself from Arica. The silly ass who owns her — he’s captain too, named Davis — he’s lost his certificate or something. You know the kind of man — calls the thing the Ipecacuanha — of all silly infernal names, though when there’s much of a sea without any wind she certainly acts according.
Then the noise overhead began again, a snarling growl and the voice of a human being together. Then another voice telling some `Heaven-forsaken idiot’ to desist.
`You were nearly dead,’ said my interlocutor. `It was a very near thing indeed. But I’ve put some stuff into you now. Notice your arms sore? Injections. You’ve been insensible for nearly thirty hours.’
I thought slowly. I was distracted now by the yelping of a number of dogs. `May I have solid food?’ I asked.
`Thanks to me,’ he said. `Even now the mutton is boiling.’
`Yes,’ I said, with assurance; `I could eat some mutton.
`But,’ said he, with a momentary hesitation, `you know I’m dying to hear how you came to be alone in the boat.’ I thought I detected a certain suspicion in his eyes.
`Damn that howling!’
He suddenly left the cabin, and I heard him in violent controversy with someone who seemed to me to talk gibberish in response to him. The matter sounded as though it ended in blows, but in that I thought my ears were mistaken. Then he shouted at the dogs and returned to the cabin.
`Well?’ said he, in the doorway. `You were just beginning to tell me.’
I told him my name, Edward Prendick, and how I had taken to natural history as a relief from the dullness of my comfortable independence. He seemed interested in this. `I’ve done some science myself — I did my Biology at University College, — getting out the ovary of the earthworm and the radula of the snail and all that. Lord! it’s ten years ago. But go on, go on — tell me about the boat.’
He was evidently satisfied with the frankness of my story, which I told in concise sentences enough — for I felt horribly weak, — and when it was finished he reverted presently to the topic of natural history and his own biological studies.